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Article published In: Register and Professional Discourse
Edited by Shelley Staples and Gavin Brookes
[Register Studies 7:1] 2025
► pp. 130–160

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Doing meetings online

Understanding variation in virtual workplace meetings

ORCiD logo with link | University College Dublin
ORCiD logo with link | Mary Immaculate College
ORCiD logo with link | Mary Immaculate College
ORCiD logo with link | Mary Immaculate College
ORCiD logo with link | Cardiff University
ORCiD logo with link | Mary Immaculate College
 | Erasmus University Rotterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University College Dublin.

Published online: 8 December 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.25016.per
Abstract
This paper contributes to previous work on workplace registers by presenting an analysis of a corpus of virtual meetings. The Interactional Variation Online corpus is comprised of recordings of virtual meetings from four different organisations. This study describes how each organisation shares similar practices when engaging in virtual meetings and how variation emerges when each organisation is compared to the other three. Corpus results show how, to establish conclusions related to this register, it is necessary to consider the influence of variation across organisations, the chairing style of each meeting, the formality of each organisational culture and the level of participant engagement in each meeting.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Video-Mediated Workplace Discourse
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis of IVO Data
    • 4.1The Structure of the Virtual Meeting
    • 4.2Role of the Chair and Turn Allocation
      • 4.2.1Nomination in turn allocation
      • 4.2.2The chair, the floor, and linguistic routines
      • 4.2.3Non-verbal routines: ‘hand(s)’ and waves
    • 4.3Inter-institutional Variation
    • 4.4Intra-institutional Variation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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